Posts filed in: ART

Had the great pleasure to view the superb exhibition of the work of Hélio Oiticica, at the Whitney. The exhibition is described as follows on the exhibition website: “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium is the first full-scale U.S. retrospective in two decades of the Brazilian artist’s work. One of the most original artists of the twentieth century, Oiticica (1937—1980) made art that awakens us to our bodies, our senses, our feelings about being in the world: art that challenges us toRead more

Ephemeral Exhibition- An Exploration of Ontological Anxiety Surrounding Digital Painting Mark O’Connell@2015 No reproduction without permission “For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.” Susan Sontag, 1966 Against Interpretation As an artist who works in the new media of digital painting, the latent paradoxes inherent in the medium at times intrigue and at others confound me. The questions of what the true nature of digital painting truly is, is one I explore while I am makingRead more

“Reposition the Canon, an Arts Based Exploration in Post-Structuralist Theory and Art Historical Biases” Mark O’Connell@2015 no reproduction without permission The visual narrative of this piece is based on the concept of knitting an unbroken narrative with a beginning, a logical progression towards an ending. Which in my opinion has been part of the process of constructing a cohesive modern art history. I have knitted a swatch to represent this historical progressive process, and then built a sculpture aroundRead more

Ductile Truths: The Malleability of the Reproductive Image. Creative Reflections on “The Precession of Simulacra” by Jean Baudrillard, Mark O’Connell@2015 No reproduction without permission “. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whoseRead more

Hummingbird Heartbeat: Explorations in Book Art, Part One, Mark O’Connell@2015, no reproduction without permission “And what is language? Language is what speaks to us as well as what we speak. Through our neurons, genes, and gestures, shared assumptions and personal quirks, we are spoken by and speak many languages each day, interacting with ourselves, with one another, other species, and the objects-natural and man-made-that populate our world. Even in silence there is no complete escape from the world of symbols,Read more